Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

Russia's large market share is rather in uranium enrichment than uranium mining. That's what I meant when I wrote "nuclear fuel".

That’s raw uranium ore. Uranium undergoes several refinement steps. In each Russia has an enormous market share.

I would classify ITER as basic research instead of a commercial nuclear power plant.

I didn't know that Enel operates nuclear power plants, that's interesting, but they seem to come from an acquisition of Endesa and have been constructed way before that acquisition, and from designs of foreign places. So they aren't modern generation reactors that one would want to build from scratch.

As for the Slovakian nuclear power plant, it's a russian design as well.

I don't doubt that Enel could operate nuclear reactors of foreign design, where Canada, Russia and France have strong capabilities, but if the design comes from a different country, do you really achieve the independence goal?

What are those engineers doing currently, then? It takes time to actually build a technology base for somethin like nuclear, and it generally requires that you are building and running nuclear power plants.

And even after years of the war in Ukraine, Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports

Everything seen so far does not suggest it will improve.

SMRs might, possibly, change that — we shall have to see. I have nothing against SMRs, but they're novel, and I've seen a lot of novel ideas that seem interesting, go nowhere.

Are you sure it was Larderello? Are you sure it wasn't... hell?

Are you joking? Renewables mean one order of magnitude more raw materials imports from China and Chinese operated mining in unstable African countries.

With some work and investment European nuclear fuel supply could be 100% free from Russia, which anyway is peanuts compared to billions spent on Russian LNG. Uranium ore can come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, not only African countries.

Uranium could be sourced from both Greenland and Ukraine, but realistically Australia, Brazil and South Africa might be better options.

Denmark also have 3700 tons of uranium ore just laying around, not sure how much actual uranium you can extract from that, very little I suspect.

> As always with nuclear there are a few taboo topics. One of them being fuel supply.

It's not taboo, the answer is just extremely simple: mining needs people willing to work in a dangerous and exhausting field, so when practical, rich countries tend to prefer outsourcing this (capitalism does not tend to reward ethics). It's very practical for uranium because nuclear reactors need a tiny volume which is trivial to ship and to store. Most countries with a nuclear program keep a stockpile of multiple years.

Mining uranium in other places is very feasible, as are other more expensive options like extracting it out of the ocean. After all, with nuclear the cost of the fuel is a tiny amount of the actual cost of power generation. This is not happening because there's really no need to. In the past, there have been uranium mines in pretty much every european country, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Euro...

(Refining/processing is a different story. But that's more obviously a "money/care" problem - there's no possible physical constraint for refining/processing as there could be for mining.)

Indeed this point is often overlooked.

I know the soviets dug up half the Czech Republic for uranium deposits though. There's still some left there, not sure how much though. I have a feeling that the reliance on Africa and Russia is more price and environmental regulation driven.

> For European reactors that seems to be either Mali/Niger, or Russia. Both not excellent if the goal is geopolitical independence.

Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada are main suppliers.

Accidents happen, you cannot eliminate completely the risk, but that is fine as long as you minimize the risk. People died because of wind power [1] but since the event is quite rare we don't ask ourselves "how do we stop wind-power-related disasters".

In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying.

For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident.

[1] https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

By not ignoring studies that find risk of tsunami damage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...

You can't. The problem with nuclear is that it needs to be properly maintained forever. If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area.

It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.

How many people died at the Fukushima disaster?

As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died.

If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.

Mainly by not building reactors designed in the 1960s.

Just don't build the plant next to Vesuvius. The biggest recorded earthquake in Europe was 7.1 magnitude, compared to 7.4 that caused tsunami that hit fukushima.

A minor concern compared to pollution from other energy sources, including "renewable" ones once you include all materials needed.

Different types of reactors have less risk of meltdown. Look up Molten-Salt Reactors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

> MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.

Their math is a bit off though... 300MW is not enough for 3.1 million households. That's 97W per household for like 2 hours.

To my understanding the use of nuclear would be to reduce the ammount of spread out battery stations that'd have to cover the base load when cloudy / at night.

There'd also be less overbuilding of solar as you have to build for winter weather and day length instead of summer if solar is supposed to cover everything

That's reassuring to know, thank you for pointing that out. I didn't get the impression this was already solved since you still keep hearing about battery fires, but hopefully this means that will be a thing of the past soon.

I would still skip this step and let it be the power company's problem though, simply because at ~400 USD / kWh they don't seem very cost efficient for off-peak storage (at least in my country).

To add, it's worth reading the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity paper: https://iaee2021online.org/download/contribution/fullpaper/1...

Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high.

Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).

Batteries simply raise the price of power up by 10x if not more. Not a viable solution.

>Isn’t this a pretty much solved problem though? Just add a battery to your house?

In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also. I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.

So people like me with solar need the other people in the area not to all go for solar, then we will need to find a way to burn the excess. Is the same with a country, we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds. The EU market might be so in demand that the rich countries will bid for the energy and the poor will have to burn their things to survive.

I am wondering if it would happen that with so many solar roofs we will either have to pay for people to use my energy or I will need to actually throw the excess in the ground safely somehow.

Solar + batteries is still cheaper than nuclear

Italy (and others) could (and should) do both.

Only thinking in terms of cost is short vision IMO. What happens if in 20/30 years you need to dramatically ramp up the energy generation (maybe everyone will drive electric, maybe house heating will be electric, maybe someone will come up with a new tech that requires a huge amount of energy, ...) and you already covered most of the roofs? or panels and batteries are at their end of life and you need massive investments just to keep up with the status quo?

I woulnd't go in a fight with a fist tied behing my back, and global warming is one of the biggest fights we must face.

The anti nuclear lobby was funded by the KGB.

> Well-timed populists.

not really. The referendum was planned long before Fukushima, but then Fukushima happened at just the right time, reminding voters just in time to vote against nuclear.

> A stark reminder that nuclear energy is not safe.

For some nebulous and often politically-charged definition of safety.

Quite the contrary: it literally says that imports are not always proportional to demand. During the day, imports are around 10%, while at night, they rise to 25%... probably because it's much cheaper and more convenient.

I don't know how effective are NK nuclear weapons, but Israel would definitely count. But according to WP[1], Israel has "research reactors" which might or might not have military use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Israel